“The very people who for years talked about the problem of conspiracy theories have become the keenest spreaders of conspiracy theories. The people who spent the past few months banging on about the ‘post-truth’ politics of Brexit and Trump have shown they don’t have the first clue what truth is. The people who posed as champions of logic have revealed themselves as peddlers of paranoia…”

During last year’s the election cycle, 21WIREcalled-out the liberal establishment’s whole ‘Russian Hack’ conspiracy as a “hoax,” but even conservative media were too shy to go that far in condemning what is obviously one of the biggest put-ups in modern political history.

As veteran journalist Robert Parry said this week on ACR’s Patrick Henningsen LIVE show this past week, a “madness” has set-in in Washington and throughout progressive liberal enclaves throughout America, as the opposition still clings to the desperate hope that some actual evidence to support their conspiracies theories about Trump and Russia will somehow manifest and provide a short-cut to his ouster.

Hillary Clinton’s internationalist tribe, American and European progressive left, is at the precipice – an entire block of society who may have lost their minds – and who could end up committed in a political bardo.

Finally, some mainstream publications are beginning to come around to call it what it is, and that’s much welcome.

The chattering classes have officially lost it. On both sides of the Atlantic.

Of course they’d been teetering on the cliff edge of sanity for a while, following the bruising of their beloved EU by 17m angry Brits and Hillary’s loss to that orange muppet they thought no one except rednecks would vote for. But now they’ve gone over. They’re falling fast. They’re speeding away from the world of logic into a cesspit of conspiracy and fear. It’s tragic. Or hilarious. One or the other.

Exhibit A: this week’s New Yorker. It’s mad. It captures wonderfully how the liberal-left has come to be polluted by the paranoid style of McCarthyist thinking since Trump’s victory. It’s a New Yorker for a future, dystopian America that’s been captured by the Evil Empire. The mag’s masthead is in Cyrillic and its famous dandy mascot — Eustace Tilley — has morphed into Putin. It’s now “Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley.”

Inside the mag it’s even more feverish. A 13,000-word report, “Trump, Putin and the New Cold War,” is accompanied by a drawing of a deep-red, UFO-style Kremlin hovering over the White House and firing lasers into it. It’s CGI Hollywood meets House Un-American Activities in an orgy of liberal dread over Ruskies ruining the nation.

It used to be right-wingers who fretted over Russians and Reds and pinkos colonising Westerners’ lives and minds. Now it’s lefties. Trump is regularly called “Putin’s puppet.” He’s an “unwitting agent” of Moscow, we’re told. The New York Times even called him “The Siberian Candidate,” echoing the title of the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, in which an American is brainwashed by Korean Communists to become an assassin. That’s how some seriously view Trump: a Putin-moulded foot soldier of Russian interests who’ll assassinate the American way of life, if not American citizens. I mean, Vanity Fairactually asks: “Is Trump a Manchurian Candidate?” These people need a lie down. You have to get deep into the New Yorker’s prolix report to discover that US officials still haven’t provided evidence for their claim that Putin ordered the hacking of Democrat emails in order to hurry Trump to power: “The declassified report [on Putin’s meddling] provides more assertion than evidence.”

But that hasn’t stopped the left McCarthyists, these Reds on the Web fearmongers, from buying into all kinds of claptrap about Putin putting Trump in the White House.

In December, a YouGov survey of Democratic voters found that 50 percent of them think “Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump.” That is, White House-eyeing Putinites actually meddled with voting machines or ballot counts. There’s no evidence whatever for this. In YouGov’s words, it’s an “election day conspiracy theory.” A kind of delirium is spreading.

The spectre of Putinite meddling is now blamed for everything that doesn’t go the liberal elite’s way…

@21WIRE says…

Anyone still wearing a mask in public is not doing so because they are actually threatened by #COVID19 (although some may be suffering from hypochondria with genuine fear), they are doing it to signal their virtue, obedience and to promote groupthink #conformity.